The Theory of Everything
by Jane Penderwick
Summary: Our story begins as they usually do, with a boy and a girl and an odd circumstance. The way in which our story unfolds however, is uniquely its own. Dear reader, this is a story that starts and pumps and stops like a heart, and there is very little you can do about any of it (the pumping, the stopping - both can be so violent).
1. The Woman with the Red Umbrella

The Theory of Everything

 _for Claire, thank you for always inspiring me  
and  
for Tori, forever ago_

Chapter One  
"The Woman with the Red Umbrella"

(Batty-11, Jane-17, Skye-17 (almost 18), Rosalind-19)

 _Our story begins as they usually do, with a boy and a girl and an odd circumstance. The way in which our story unfolds however, is uniquely its own._

 _Our story begins with a man sitting in the backseat of a taxicab on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Fifty-Seventh Street. The man is young. The arms on his jacket are a bit too short and his nose is slightly crooked. The man first sees her through a grimy taxicab window that seems to obscure the beauty of everything in the grey city but no, no. Not her. When he first sees her, his chin is resting on the cracked vinyl of the door and his nose is pressed into the glass so that it turns up a bit, like children do to amuse their friends on the other side. When he first sees her, the red umbrella catches his attention but the look on her face makes his head snap up and bump ungracefully against the doorframe. Her mouth… goodness that mouth. Mouth like the latch on a locket. Mouth like it's going to rain. Mouth like a chrysanthemum. Snapdragon, thistle, marigold mouth!_

 _The woman is running, rounding the corner onto Seventh Avenue with her clothes flying and her red umbrella above her acting more like a parachute in the cold wind than it should. She is grinning like a small child, gleeful and terrified like you might be in a game of tag. Her tongue pokes out of the corner of her mouth in determination, and his heart stutters a bit in his chest. He realizes that she is running toward the bus stop almost immediately, because he had chased down a few buses at that corner himself._

 _He is waving his hands then, rather pointlessly in the air, at the girl, at the cabbie, at this girl. When he finds his words he tells the cabbie to stop, thanks, and yes I realize we have only gone maybe forty feet or so and no, keep the change. And then he stumbles out of the cab and onto the wet streets of New York, New York._

 _The woman is still running and the bus, hulking on the corner like a thing alive, was belching steam into the cold misty air. Martin suddenly found himself running too, the water on the pavement soaking the bottom of his pant legs. Then, in a great culmination of sound and motion, Martin and the woman both reached the bus, just as it shuttered to life and the doors started to swing shut..._

 _Martin threw out his hand and caught the doors at the last moment, squishing his fingers slightly before forcing the doors open again. The woman was laughing from behind him._

 _"Goodness. Thank you."_

 _"You're welcome."_

 _With a quick step she was up and retreating into the belly of the beast, handing a small shiny coin to the bus driver with that laughing voice like wind chimes. He cursed himself as she walked away. What luck! He helped the girl of his dreams slip from his fingers!_

 _"Are you coming?" he heard a small tinkling voice ask from inside the dark bus. He looked up to see her looking at him._

 _"Where are you going?"_

 _"Does it matter?" she asked, her mouth - god, her mouth - curving up into a small smile._

 _Martin simply grunted and followed her in._

 _Several stops later, she was laughing at his quiet jokes and the way his glasses sat askew on his nose. Several more stops and she touched his knees with a silent reverence. When she finally whispered that the next stop was hers, she produced a pen and wrote her telephone number in the curve of his wrist. As she walked away from him down the isle he called after her._

 _"You never told me your name!"_

 _"It's Elizabeth."_

 _Elizabeth. The first time he whispered it, it tasted like the next seventy years of his life in his mouth._

 _(Seventy years cut to twenty-four, twenty-four long enough for a thousand lives to be lived in between.)_

 _Dear reader, this is a story that starts and pumps and stops like a heart, and there is very little you can do about any of it (the pumping, the stopping - both can be so violent)._

…

Skye was standing with the hot sun on her back, cloaked by a small cloud of dust. There was blood in the dirt and blood on her teeth and her knuckles connected with his jaw sending him to the dirt of the old school yard. Pain erupted in her hand and blood dribbled from his chin down her wrist. Her head was buzzing like a traffic light at midnight. Sweat dripped into her eyes as his friends jumped to separate them. Before they could pull her off, Skye spat in the dirt and with a feeling of grim triumph, walked away.

When Skye dropped Batty off at the elementary school for the last day before summer break holding another girl's hand and grinning from ear to ear, Skye half expected this - the teasing, the crestfallen eyes, the bloodied lip. She also fully expected it to never happen again.

When Skye jumped the chain link fence to rejoin Batty on the sidewalk beside the school, Batty's eyes were wide and she looked positively horrified that Skye had just beaten up one of her classmates (albeit a very tall fifth grader). Skye rolled her eyes and took her hand because really, was she all that surprised? They walked for a few blocks like this, in the stifling heat and silence until Batty stopped dead in her tracks.

"Skye? Am I odd?"

Skye licked her chapped lips and struggled against the reeling head of the rage she felt in her chest. She suddenly felt very young, like she was eleven years old and kneeling in front of her younger sister in the grass in front of a mansion in the foothills of the Berkshires. Eleven-year-old heart the size of a fist, always swinging. Batty, alligator teardrop eyes and crumpling butterfly wings…

Skye rolled her tongue over her teeth, tasting the coppery slickness there and then knelt down in front of her sister, because even at eleven years old (heart like a fist, fist clutching another girl's hand), Batty was much shorter than Skye.

"No, stupid. You're perfect."

…

And so Skye saved the day again, because Skye has always been brave. Batty was sitting on the back steps with Rosalind and Jane sitting on either side of her. Rosalind was holding a cold, damp towel to her lip and Jane was fretting.

"Why didn't you say anything?" Jane asked, and Rosalind shot her a dark look that told her to be quiet.

Batty shrugged. "I'm not very brave," she mumbled against the towel.

"I don't think that's true," Rosalind said, but Batty was pretty sure she only said it out of sisterly obligation.

Inside the house, Batty could hear Alec's booming laughter and a party popper being opened (probably courtesy of Ben). The Tiftons were in town for Skye and Jeffrey's high school graduation. She looked out across the yard where Skye was standing across from Jeffrey, wild hair like a mane, heart like a lion's. Skye was the kind of brave that made itself known. She wore it around her shoulders like a cloak, and Batty swore she could almost see it settling around her collarbone, shimmering and unbreakable. It was something in her steel blue eyes, something in her gait, something in her swollen knuckles… Like now, when Skye turned hard on her heel and marched Jeffrey out the side gate in the direction of Quigley Wood, something about her radiated a confidence that Batty was nearly certain she would never possess.

…

Skye was laughing and racing ahead of Jeffrey, barefoot through the woods. The path had been beaten down by her own feet so many times before that the path had become worn and well defined. The woods around them blurred green and brown as they raced on. Jeffrey let out a whoop behind her that sent the cardinals scattering and fluttering around the canopy in a tizzy. Skye looked over her shoulder at him, laughing again at the goofy look of satisfaction on his face. "Come on!" she shouted, jumping over the creek at a particularly narrow part and charging up the bank on the other side. She hadn't done this in years. The last time she had been here she had taken Batty, who insisted upon going slowly, picking their way through the trees. The sun peeked through the leaves above them and fell hot against her back and a cool wind wound its way around her shoulders. Everything smelled of leaf rot and damp wood, and for the first time in a long time, the decay was on the outside. Skye could breathe a little easier.

Skye didn't stop running until she came to the double row of overgrown lilacs, where she turned around and walked backwards to watch Jeffrey's face as they came upon the ruined house in the woods. He wore an expression of awe and exhaustion, and she grinned. If Skye were a more sentimental person (which _of course_ , she wasn't), she might wish to freeze this moment in time forever; chests heaving with effort, sweat making their shirts stick to their backs, his eyes looking young and wild like they were when they first met, before he was soft and doughy-eyed. It was good, and Skye wanted to curl up and die in it.

Skye came to the clearing where the foundations of the ancient house stood and stepped forward to lead Jeffrey through the gap where the door once was. She stopped in the middle of the old house and gestured around her.

"This place must have burned down years ago. Now it belongs to the birds and the rabbits." A cardinal swooped down from the top of the chimney as if to prove her point. "It's kinda my special place."

Jeffrey let out a low whistle and stooped down to run his fingers over the stone.

"Why are you showing me this?"

Skye sighed and blew a long breath out between her teeth. "I'm extending an olive branch."

"You're what?"

"It's a peace offering, stupid. I mean, we're still best friends, right? After everything?" After stair-top conversations and phone-whisper confessions?

"Oh," he said. "Of course." But Skye saw his eyes say something different than his mouth, and she lurched forward to catch his sleeve before he could turn away from her and rearrange his facial features into careful indifference again.

"Jeffrey." She whipped him around to face her with a sharp tug at his shirt. "You said you were over it."

"I never said I was over it, I said I would stop bothering you about it," he said, mouth twisting bitterly. A surprisingly cool wind blew across the clearing, making the hair that usually lays flat against his forehead stand out at an odd angle.

"Well, get over it. I told you it wasn't going to happen." She was trying to sound angry, but her voice was desperate. Why couldn't he understand?

"I know Skye."

"Then why are we still doing this?"

"Because I can't. Okay? I can't." Why can't _she_ understand? She was twisting his sleeve hard enough now that it hurt. Everything hurt.

She looked down but her iron grip remained solid. "Don't say that," she said.

Jeffrey sighed. "Skye, let go of me."

"Not until you let go of me," she said. He knew what she meant.

"No."

Skye twisted his sleeve harder and made some inhuman noise in the back of her throat before she wrenched him forward and kissed him hard. It was an angry kiss. It was a surprising click of teeth and lips that were hard and tasted metallic. It was two hearts clenching painfully and curled fingers digging into wrists. She kissed him because she was seventeen and reckless, young and angry, and because even with her mouth open against his, he was her best friend and she needed him to understand. She ripped her mouth away after impossibly long seconds, and when his eyes slid open to look into hers, her thunderstorm eyes flashed betrayal. In that moment he knew. Finally, he _knew._

…

In truth, her heart is a heart held in a hand that's balled into a fist.

There is no release in this analogy and no release in her love.

In truth, her heart was a heart always and forever her own.

…

Skye didn't go home. Instead she wandered through the town; along the deer trails in the woods, through backyards, along sidewalks until she got to where she didn't know she was going. It was fitting though, she supposed, for her feet to take her here. After everything (after stair-top conversations and house-ruin kisses) she felt that she needed to lay a great something to rest. What better place to bury your almost-ghosts than a cemetery?

Skye climbed over the brittle rod iron fence and caught her pants just once on the intricate ironwork. The air was cooler here than it had been in the woods, something about the thick shade and cold bodies.

She picked her way through the dandelions and thistles to where the familiar headstone stood guard under the shade of a maple tree. She dropped to her knees with a soft thump in the dirt and she forced herself not to think about the bones beneath her. The stone, though worn smooth with age hadn't changed over the years and Skye took comfort in this, reaching out to trace the letters there that her fingers knew well ( R).

She and her sisters visited here often, but it was always alone and never something they talked about. Skye only knew about their visits by the things they left behind. Rosalind, for example, left fresh bunches of primroses from the woods every Tuesday during the spring and summer months. Jane left words – bits of poetry and prose - written on little scraps of paper and tucked into the crannies of the rock. Batty had been to their mother's grave exactly once, and Skye only knew this because Batty asked her to drive her there once a few years ago. Skye had been curious enough to oblige without complaining, and remembered waiting in the idling car in front of the old church as Batty scampered around the back to the graveyard gate like it was yesterday. Batty left nothing, or so Skye thought. ( _Though the churchgoers swore that if you listened closely, you could hear the little tune that Batty had left dancing through the trees that day.)_ And Skye? Skye left fistfuls of frustrations. After all, they say that her mother had the same obdurate spirit as her, so Skye figured she would understand.

Today, she left a memory of a kiss and melting green eyes, forcing it from her body into the ground where she was hoping she could leave six feet under _(Silly girl, don't you know how ghost haunt? How dirt and death don't make a difference?)._ It wasn't very scientific, but for once Skye didn't care. When it came to her mother, Skye was every bit a blind believer as the churchgoers. When she felt satisfied – foolishly, blindly – that the thing was buried from sight, she sat back on her hands and let the cool air wash her of the woods and his hands.

The day was beautiful; warm where the sun fell in patches on the grass, cool where the shade fell in the negatives, insects and birds teeming at the edge of the forest. Skye could feel the bitterness in her bones fading as he slipped from her mind. As her gaze floated around she spotted a man standing in the shade of the elm near the gate. It was her father, looking ghostly and surreal in the hazy light, his arms behind his back. Skye wondered for a brief moment if he was an apparition of sorts, the bit of his spirit that he laid to rest with her mother. Ridiculous thoughts! How illogical! This was the first time Skye doubted that seeing was really believing and she left this little betrayal of science with her mother, buried in a grave of its own.

She rose to her feet and went to him. Never mind how he knew she was here, he always seemed to know anyway. When she reached him he wrapped an arm around her shoulder and they walked slowly through the cool graveyard, through the kissing gate and to the pickup truck that her father had bought off of Aunt Claire for four hundred dollars when Flashvan finally broke down.

As Skye was buckling her seatbelt, he looked at her carefully for a long moment before turning the key in the ignition and bringing the sputtering truck to life.

"Want to tell me how, exactly, you made a teenage boy cry?"

Skye huffed. "Daddy, don't ask such absurd questions."

He shook his head fondly, wearily, and didn't ask again.

…

That night when she fell into a restless sleep, Skye dreamed of a burning house and a boy inside that she couldn't get out. She lied down next to him and watched the firelight dance on his familiar face until it over took both of them in a flash of light and heat. The last thing she saw was the smoke in his eyes before she woke up.

No one who loves either of them speaks of the "graduation party incident" and the sore festers.

...

Author's note: So I wrote this several years ago and found it recently on my laptop, largely unedited and unfinished. I spent the summer fixing it up for you all but I left a lot of the original content as a bit of a tribute to my younger self. The story is often a bit out of character, something I have become much better at as I have grown older, but I apologize in advance for that. It was almost entirely written before The Penderwicks in Spring came out so it's not in compliance with that. Also note that the first part of each chapter is written as a flashback - I hope this is clear.

The whole story has been written, so updates will depend on the response that I get. **UPDATES WILL HAPPEN ON ARCHIVE OF OUR OWN FIRST.** I'd love if you would check out the story over there (my username over there is janependerwick). Love you all.


	2. The Bomb Squad

Chapter Two  
"The Bomb Squad"

(Batty-12, Jane-18, Skye-19, Rosalind-20)

 _His roommate's name is Todd, who is scrawny like himself and has a smattering of freckles on his cheekbones that stand out like drops of ink on white paper. None of Todd's clothes fit him quite right, because no sports coat is cut slim enough for his thin waist or has arms long enough to reach his wrists. But no matter, Todd makes up for his lack of bulk with swagger and zeal. Todd considers himself an expert on girls, and Martin is a novice at best, so Martin usually listens closely to the advice that Todd bestows on him on the subject. But when Martin mentions that he and Elizabeth were going on a date to the botanical gardens, and Todd vehemently protests that "no pretty girl wants to look at plants," Martins simply shakes his head._

 _"You don't know THIS girl."_

 _Elizabeth met him in the glass conservatory in the prettiest dress he thought he had ever seen, smiling and talking about a garden she tended to when she was eleven. She held his hand in the rose garden and laughed over his clumsy explanations about the science of snapdragons. In the orchid room, he accidently told her he was "probably was in love with her" and sometimes mistakes like these end beautifully. When she left, she smiled into his neck and said "forget-me-not" before laughing at her own pun, and... yes he was sure now, he was in love._

…

Batty was walking Duchess when she ran into Charlie for the first time. Or rather, he ran into her. Batty had been happily minding her own business as Duchess waddled in front of her, her belly swinging low. While Duchess had admittedly lost a lot of weight since Batty reluctantly started her dog walking business, Batty was still hesitant to classify Duchess' movement as anything more athletic than a waddle.

When Batty first met Charlie, the church bells two streets over were playing Mozart but he was bobbing his head to the Smith's _There Is A Light That Never Goes Ou_ t. Batty didn't see him coming, but Duchess did, and took off towards the boy with the headphones before Batty could do anything about it. There was a tangled leash and legs, wide eyes, and then limbs splayed out on the pavement and a Walkman skittering to a stop a few feet away.

"Sorry," Batty mumbled as she attempted to disentangle Duchess from the boy.

The boy picked himself up and brushed at the dust on the front of his jeans. Batty, still leaning backwards against the strain of Duchess at the end of the leash, took a moment to take the strange boy in. He had dark curly hair and blue eyes and an odd, wiry frame.

"It's okay kiddo," he chirped, inspecting the state of a skinned elbow.

Batty's head snapped up, and she narrowed her eyes as she tried to figure out what he was getting at with the nickname. His bright blue eyes were blinking back at her, wide and honest, and Batty swore she could see a mist clearing in them, like he had been in some otherworldly place before the mishap with Duchess. Finding him to not pose much of a threat, she stooped to pick up his Walkman.

"How old are you anyways?" she asked.

"Twelve years and two months." He ran a hand through his messy hair, and Batty wondered when the last time he thought to brush it was.

Batty nodded and then pointed at herself with her thumb. "Twelve years and three months," she said, fighting a feeling of sly triumph. _Kiddo. Ha!_ He nodded briskly. It felt like a business transaction, but when you are only twelve years old, age is every bit as important as names. She soon learned that his was Charlie Fink.

Batty looked the Walkman over, checking for cracks, when the song still filtering though the headphones made Batty freeze.

"You like good music." She hit the next button on the player, and the Smiths were replaced by Joy Division. Batty was reminded of the records that Jeffrey had bought for her when he introduced her to "the classics."

"What?"

"You like _good_ music."

The boy grinned then, his eyes suddenly crystal clear. "Would you like to listen?"

…

Jane was muttering poems under her breath about the oppressive summer heat when she walked into the 7/11. Conveniently nestled in the crook of the road that ran between the high school and the main residential area, the gas station had become a popular hangout for Jane and her friends during their senior year. Now, in the middle of the dog days of summer, she visited the place mainly for the purpose of cherry slushes when the heat made writing unbearable.

He looked like a lonely god among candy bars and energy drinks. Or that's what she would later write in her notebook about him. Jane stopped dead in her tracks when she saw him, her lips still wrapped around the straw of her cherry slush in an 'o' and her sneakers sticking to the floor where someone had obviously spilled a soda. He was wearing a white tee shirt and dark, bold lines tattooed on his skin peeked out from his collar and his sleeves. He was holding a pamphlet from a rack at the front of the store with a map of Massachusetts when he looked up at her.

"Are you from here?"

Jane thought he was probably a fallen angel. That perhaps his voice was the gospel. She nodded, and realizing that she had yet to remove the straw from her mouth, did so.

"Can you help me out then?" he asked, lifting the map as he bobbed his shoulder in a shrug.

He tells her is name is Noah (like the arc, he says, only less destined) and he buys her a package of liquorish in return for her help. Sitting on the curb outside the gas station, Jane used his map and a blue ballpoint pen to draw a line along the roads he would need to get to his uncle's house as he stole sips of her slush, staining his tongue and teeth red. His grin was something wolfish and wild and Jane grinned back at him with red lips unafraid.

"Are you passing through?" she asked, stealing the slush back and taking a sip. The taste was like sucking on cough drops.

He took the slush back with nimble fingers. "I think I might stay awhile." Jane examined his hands, remembering something that Rosalind mentioned about learning things about a person based on what their hands look like. Noah's were slim and quick, but they shook slightly. She wondered what that meant. "My uncle offered me a job hauling goods for his store. Since I have the truck and everything," he said, pointing a thumb in the direction of a dark green pickup in the parking lot. "He isn't paying much but it's enough to get me where I want to go."

"Where are you going?"

This made his eyes shimmer with something violently wild. Jane felt chills run up the ladder of her spine only to throw themselves into the chasm of her chest. He leaned closer.

Everything smelled like gasoline and the church bells four streets over were playing Mozart.

"Everywhere," he said.

And Jane fell in love.

…

The way Jane saw it, everyone was given one big mistake in life, like a get-out-of-jail-free card. The kind where you get away with it even though you know you shouldn't have. The kind that leaves you wide-eyed and eager to learn and move on.

In a year Jane would look back, shaking her head and laughing slightly, counting this day as her one big mistake.

In several years she would run a knotted hand though her greying hair and change her mind. She would think of the boy – the red-tongued boy, the wolf boy, the boy with the trembling hands only in wry fondness, but that would not be for many years to come.

…

"He is a sleaze," Skye said from somewhere in the kitchen.

"Tattoos do not necessarily equate to sleaziness, Skye," Jane quipped back.

"No, but there is generally a correlation."

Batty rolled her eyes at her sisters' bickering and took Charlie's hand, dragging him inside the house and toward the stairs.

The pair collapsed on her bedroom floor, their small legs folding under them like bird wings, their knees just barely touching. Charlie pulled the Walkman from his pocket, disconnected the thing from the headphones and punched the play button.

 _Today_ by The Smashing Pumpkins came on. Batty lost her breath over it.

"Someday I'm going to get a guitar. I've been saving money, see?" The boy produced eleven dollars and seventy-eight cents from his pocket.

"I have a lawn mowing business," he explained and Batty nodded seriously. "Anyway, once I get my guitar, this is going to be the first song I learn. I am going to be in a band one day."

Batty had seen a blind man fall to wasted knees to pray. Watched the men on the TV catching bullets in the name of god. Watched as a woman in the super market grasped her arm tightly and warned about a flood, no, a fire. They were all asking Batty to believe, but she didn't have that kind of faith to give just yet.

What Batty did believe in, was music. Maybe it was the ubiquity of the thing, the universal nature of the language. Maybe it was simply because music made sense to her, and in such a messy world, that counted for something. Whatever the reason, Batty followed the music, consistently, blindly. Charlie reached over and put his hand on her knee, tapping out the beat to _Today_ into her skin with his fingers. Syncopating now, switching to double time. Like a complex Morse code that she felt unlocking all her doors from the inside.

She wasn't sure what it was but that blue look and those fingers that could find a beat in the silence made her think that perhaps he wouldn't leave.

After all, Batty had faith in the music.

...

"Love is a landmine, don't you think?" Jane's mouth was set in a serious line, though her lips, stained a goofy cherry slush-red, mocked her own seriousness. She was thinking about a boy.

Skye snorted ungracefully and wiped at her eyebrows with her shirtsleeve. What a ridiculous metaphor. She passed a beautiful, hard ball to Jane.

Jane trapped it at her feet and neatly scored in the pop up goal they had set up in the backyard. She was persistent. "Think about it. You never see it coming until the wreckage of your heart is everywhere."

Skye rolled it over on her tongue and decided she liked the gore. She relented.

"I think… I think I am a very scared member of the bomb squad."

The pair collapsed into the overgrown grass, sweaty and content.

"I thought you weren't scared of anything," Jane said, and then she paused, remembering a tragic night in middle school and a play about rainbows. "Except like... the performing arts."

Skye shuddered at the memory and then shrugged dismissively. Jane nodded and let it go. She supposed it was best not press her older sister on such matters. She stole the ball from where it lay in the grass next to Skye, and took full advantage of the head start as she took off toward the goal. The two sisters played soccer in the backyard until they smashed an urn with a poorly aimed soccer ball.


	3. Blue Summer

Chapter Three

"Blue Summer"

(Batty-13, Jane-19, Skye-20, Rosalind-21)

 _Elizabeth lobbed a bottle of nail polish at Martin from where she stood in her bare feet in the bathroom. Her toes were freshly painted bright red. Now the wall behind Martin's head was too. Elizabeth was furious with him. Which was... fair. He had gotten so caught up working on his thesis on the evolutionary origins of Nepenthes ventricosa that he had forgotten to pay the electricity bill. And so, Elizabeth was throwing things in the dark, and Martin was standing in the middle of the living room, thinking she looked lovely._

 _"Please stop, honey," Martin pleaded. He snatched a pillow off the couch to use as shield against the many projectiles being launched from the bathroom. A comb whizzed by his ear. "I'll pay it first thing in the morning, I swear."_

 _Elizabeth threw a curling iron at him. Not a hot one of course... Martin was secretly very glad he forgot to pay the electricity bill in that moment._

 _"How can I trust you with children someday when you can't even remember to pay the bills! I reminded you!"_

 _Elizabeth was now marching toward him, blue eyes blazing, brandishing a hairbrush like a sword. Martin might have laughed if her face hadn't been so damn serious._

 _She swung the hairbrush and caught the corner of Martin's pillow with a soft thump. He gulped and backed up, stumbling over the couch in the process and knocking the glasses clear off his face._

 _Elizabeth seemed stunned for a moment. "I'm sorry," she whispered. She rushed to pick up his glasses from where they had fallen. When they had both straightened back up, she situated them carefully on his nose for him. "I'm sorry," she said again._

 _"I'm sorry I forgot to pay the bill," Martin offered, smiling slightly._

 _She sighed and looked around at the contents of her bathroom, now strewn across their living room. She ducked her head, suddenly embarrassed. "We'll just have an electricity free evening?"_

 _Martin grinned and she kissed his jaw. Martin ordered Chinese takeout, and Elizabeth lit candles in every dark corner._

...

The summer was starting and everybody was leaving.

The first person Batty ever loved had floppy hair and a quick smile. He collected baseball cards and bottle caps and kissed her over the garden gate on the first warm day of spring. It was a bumbling kiss. A bumping of noses, a quick press of lips… Batty was pretty sure she could have written a sonata to the thing. When he moved away at the start of summer, Batty cried and Charlie bought them two tickets to the orchestra with his guitar fund money. He held her hand through all of the beautiful things and all of the discord. By the fifth movement, Batty was feeling significantly better and they snuck away to buy ice cream cones for two dollars at the corner store downtown.

Spring gave way to summer, and Batty soon forgot all about the boy. And so first crushes go.

The first day of summer was drip-drop lazy. Full of white silhouettes and red, white, and blue popsicles dribbling down wrists.

Blue nights.

Celestial lights.

Soft edges.

Hazy.

Batty licked a drop of red popsicle syrup from her thumb as she kicked a bottle cap down the street. Next to her in the road, Charlie was balancing his bike with one hand and licking at a vanilla ice cream cone in the other. They meandered up the block towards a house that once belonged to a certain bottle cap boy.

When the house came into view, Batty slowed to a stop. The "For Sale" sign was gone from the front yard and brown boxes wrapped in packing tape replaced it. A new family must have moved into the neighborhood. Batty wondered briefly if they had kids her age to be friends with.

"Batty!" Charlie called, biking in lazy circles as he waited for her to catch up.

Batty noticed a girl was standing on the porch slurping on a mostly empty glass of tea. She was about Batty's age and very pretty. Batty suddenly felt very heavy.

The girl had a peach colored frock dress. Peach colored lips. A peach pit heart you would never expect. ( _Dear reader, don't you know what happens to girls that can't stop dreaming of orchards?)_

"Batty, c'mon," Charlie threw over his shoulder as he pedaled away.

Batty fought against a memory, surfacing from the depths of her mind like something great and terrible. The memory was incessant, tugging at the corners of her brain until Batty felt her will crumble and the image took over. In the memory it is summer and everything is overripe, the kind where the fruit hangs heavy and the sky bruises easily. The sun is shining between the leaves and Batty is looking down on a family in a peach orchard. She recognizes the daughter; the steel blue eyes and blonde hair could be none other than her sister Skye. But the woman who had Skye up on her shoulders, a splitting image of Skye herself…

"Batty!" Charlie called again.

This couldn't be a memory, could it? Skye reached up into the leaves are plucked one of the sweet fruits. Below her, their mother was laughing.

"Batty!"

Batty shook her head and blinked. The girl on the porch was gone.

"Coming!"

...

Jane was sitting tall in the cab of his green truck when she left. Her eyes were wide, yawning, situated at the brink of everything. She waved as Noah pulled out of the driveway and Skye, standing barefoot in the lawn, almost threw up. Her father wrapped an arm around her.

"Sometimes you must lose yourself before you can find yourself," he said.

...

At the end of the summer, Skye packed her bags and headed out west again, back to school. She brought with her three large math books, a map of the lunar surface, and a telescope.

She did well, because of course she did. She was top of her class, respected by peers and professors alike. She called sometimes, from her dorm room floor, talking about quantum physics and the butterfly effect. Jane would hold the pay phone tightly to her ear, and Rosalind would balance the white cord phone between her cheek and shoulder as she painted her toes a deep blue. Skye spoke about a few boys at Caltech that all suspiciously had brown hair and green eyes. Rosalind said she has a type. Jane shook her head and knew better. They were all the same; smart, pretentious, majors in math or physics with a penchant for astronomy. Jane called them "the lunar boys" because they rambled something about the stars and came and went as quickly as the phases of the moon.

There was one boy who stayed. He was the first to do so without asking Skye's permission, and this was startling enough to her that she let him. He was odd and gorgeous (Jane's words, not hers) and believed in Santa Clause for the longest time. He had freckles in the shape of the big dipper ( _Ursa Major_ , Skye corrected). She let him get comfortable there, in the crux of heart, and suddenly he was sleeping in her bed and making her coffee in the mornings and she was wearing his sweatshirt. It was all disgustingly domestic if you asked her.

Whirlwind of a girl.

Boy paper-thin.

A door slamming behind her.

The headlines all read: _Lights all Askew in the Heavens_ and _Stars not Where They Seemed or Were Calculated to be, but Nobody Need Worry._

She drove out to the coast and found that the ocean had turned black. When she called, she spoke out the west slipping off into the sea. When the moon disappeared, she packed up her things and headed home. What she was looking for could no longer be found in the California hills.

"I am going to Boston. Transferring to Harvard. It's better this way."

He sputtered and tipped over a stack of papers on black holes and dark matter. The heavy stuff you can't see. She watched it float to his ankles before looking at him. When his eyes asked her to stay, Skye smiled, almost sadly, and toed an article about the mysterious gravity in all that space.

She thought about a boy.

And all that _fucking_ space.

"You don't even know me," she said. And that was that.

When she arrived in Boston, even the flowers cried when they saw her.

…

"Batty c'mon!" Ben said. He tugged harder at her shirtsleeves.

Nick was home and Batty was taking a carefully balanced casserole and a very excited boy across the street to see him. Fragile things and boys don't mix very well, or so Rosalind had told her, but she managed to make it to his doorstep without accident.

When Nick opened the door, Ben started talking fast, turning out his pockets and emptying about half the contents of his rock collection onto their kitchen floor. Nick watched on fondly, as he set out to make lunch for everyone. There was a good deal of clatter and conversation but Batty felt as if someone had stuffed cotton in her ears and drizzled honey over the tongue.

Batty was sitting at the Greiger's breakfast table with carefully applied peach lip balm. She could still feel the small soft hands that held her chin as it was applied. Could still see the sugar drop eyes of the girl that applied it. Batty was pretty sure that no one, not even the moon, had such an inviting mouth.

Nick put a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in front of Batty as Ben launched into a discussion about the differences between quartz and crystal and Nick leaned back in his chair.

"And you Batty?" he asked when Ben was incapacitated by a large bite of peanut butter and jelly sandwich in his cheek. "How are you?"

She talks about the girl who can play the cello and dots her "I"s with hearts and only drinks tea sweet and Nick smiles like he knows.


	4. God Hates Flags

Chapter Four  
"God Hates Flags"

(Batty-17, Jane-23, Skye-24, Rosalind-25)

The little bar - pub might be a better word - was situated in the middle of the town. It was small and dark, and a low haze of smoke hung over everything. It smelled of bodies and alcohol. Despite all of this though, Batty supposed it had an element of charm. The owner was always playing a banjo in the corner and let her in for free if she promised him a song on the upright piano on the back wall.

Batty pushed through the backdoor of the place, which shuttered like a ghost on its old hinges before groaning and falling in. The heady smell and warmth enveloped her almost immediately, and she knocked the snow from her boots.

"You're late, he is already on," a red headed girl clutching a tambourine practically yelled over the noise, ushering her in and helping Batty up onto the makeshift stage behind the curtain.

Batty parted the heavy, waxy curtain and peeked out.

Charlie was standing on the little wooden stage in skinny jeans and high tops with a guitar over one shoulder and one hand in his curly, black hair. Batty bought him that very guitar four years prior with her dog walking money. He played every single show with it since. A crowd of people stood below him, and behind him stood his drummer and base guitarist and a myriad of amps and cords. The lights flashed in blue and red and Charlie looked almost ethereal in the light, singing into the mic and reaching down to the crowd in front of him as they reached up with eager (greedy) hands.

Batty sat down on an old kick drum turned on its side backstage and waited for the set to end and for Charlie to find her like he always did. She rested her head against the back wall and let the music swallow her whole, peeking around the curtain to watch the crowd get lost within itself.

Batty noticed a girl standing off to the side of the crowd. She had seen her before. The girl came to most of the shows, always alone and dancing as if nobody was watching. This, of course, wasn't true - _everyone_ was watching. How could they not? She had big brown eyes and slender shoulders and cherry cough drop lips that made everyone want to kiss her. At least the boys; Batty could see it in their hungry eyes.

The girl raised her arms above her head and swayed her hips in perfect rhythm, her eyes falling shut as she did so. A few of the braver boys wandered over during the song changes and tried to whisper things into her ear, but she seemed to hardly notice them, let alone pay them any attention. In time they wandered off defeated, and the girl dissolved like a sugar cube into the music.

The set ended in a startling bass crunch and the crowd cheered. Moments later, Charlie slipped through the curtains and knelt in front of Batty, all pearl tooth smile and green eyes.

"So?"

Batty tore her eyes away form the girl and focused on his face.

"It was brilliant Charlie."

Charlie laughed and rolled his eyes, sneaking a sidelong glance at the girl leaning against the sidewall.

"You could go talk to her you know, instead of just creepily staring."

"I'm not staring."

"Like hell you aren't."

"I'm not creepy."

"Debatable."

Batty sighed and mashed the foot petal on the old kick drum.

Thump.

It rattled a bit with its age. Charlie sat a small shot glass down in front of her filled with something amber. "Liquid courage?" Batty gave him a very pointed look and he shrugged, pushing his damp hair back with one hand and shuffling a bit in his converse. "Gal from the bar gave it to me. These girls are killing us, Batty," he said with a wink.

Thump.

As if to prove his point, a group of girls came giggling and stumbling around the side of the little stage, reaching for Charlie. Batty rolled her eyes. Ever since his band had become such a local success, girls had been coming up to him asking for their palms to be kissed and for their foreheads to be signed as if he was something divine. They couldn't understand. It was the mortality about him that made Batty love him so fiercely. The sweat in his eyes, the way his body curled around the guitar...

Thump.

A pretty blonde girl pressed a sharpie into Charlie's hand and asked him to sign his name in the hollow just above her collarbone, and Batty suddenly felt very claustrophobic.

"I am going home," she announced and hopped off the drum.

Charlie, who had been laughing along with the pretty blonde and her friends, quickly jumped up and caught her wrist.

"Aw c'mon Battykins, don't go. I can ask them all to leave," he offered, even as the girls tugged at his shirt.

Batty rolled her eyes (again! she was starting to feel like Skye) and kissed his cheek. "You and I both know they are good for your publicity," she said, nodding towards the girls. She then very pointedly dumped the contents of the little shot glass into a houseplant squatting beside one of the old upright pianos backstage. After all, it was the Penderwick thing to do. She only hoped the poor plant didn't suffer from the unconventional watering. She threw her coat over her shoulders and started for the door.

"You're still my number one girl!" Charlie called.

"Don't forget it," she tossed back at him, and with a hard shove on the door, stepped back into the night and snow.

The intense absence of heat and noise was startling in comparison to the atmosphere inside the pub. The space around Batty felt almost like a vacuum, and she welcomed the lack. She trudged home through the snow by way of a shortcut, which cut back across the schoolyard and through a small stretch of Quigley Wood. The shortcut was Skye's invention and used to terrify Batty at night, but the moon was full and reflecting bright off of the snow covered ground, so her walk was pretty and well lit. She stumbled only once, in a particularly deep snowdrift, before continuing on her way. In no time, she emerged from the woods onto the cul-de-sac at the end of her street. Usually Batty would run the rest of the way home, eager to tell her father about the show and to wrap herself up in the light and warmth of her kitchen, but tonight Batty stood frozen in place at the end of the street, ankle deep in the cold snow.

Two men were standing in the street, both in uniform, both with their heads bowed. The men marched up the road in the light of the streetlamps, now casting a soft orange glow on the snow, with hard-set jaws and soft eyes that were crinkled like candy wrappers at the edges. Batty watched them come to a stop in front of the Greiger's house as if steeling themselves for what was to come. They carried with them a folded flag and a set of dog tags.

...

 _Somewhere, in the middle of a snowy street, a small girl grows cold and quiet. The world around her moves in slow motion and she watches it all through the fog made by her own warm breath. The men in uniform knock on the door, their eyes trained on their combat boots._

 _And she knows._

 _And something, somewhere, high on the shelves of her heart, falls._

 _Somewhere, in the middle of a big, big world, a small girl turns her eyes to the dark sky and whispers - says, "God hates flags."_

...

Rosalind stood behind Skye in front of the mirror, her slender fingers pulling Skye's hair back in a tight braid. They were both wearing black.

Rosalind's fingers were deftly quick, but they shook slightly, a fact that was not lost on Skye. In the mirror, Skye saw Tommy come to the doorway, dressed in a black suit and undoubtedly hiding from the visitation that was being held at the Greiger household across the street. She watched Rosalind's eyes flick up to meet Tommy's heavily in the mirror. Something thick and almost tangible passed between them in a mere look, and Skye felt an overwhelming urge to look away.

Like a ghost - perhaps a bit too much like a ghost - Tommy's dark form disappeared from the doorway and Skye looked up at Rosalind in the mirror.

Nick Greiger's absence was spread over everything, like a thin film of dust that wouldn't go away. When Skye opened her mouth to say something, say _anything_ , to Rosalind, it was like she got a mouth of the dusty stuff choking back her words. The subsequent silence was nothing new. Batty hadn't played music since that night. Rosalind moved quietly around everything, making no sound and no impact, like a haunting spirit. Jane, who returned from her travels with Noah as soon as she got the news, couldn't even find the words. And Ben... Ben simply kept a silent watch form the front porch wearing the camouflage jacket Nick once gave him as if he was holding his own vigil for the silence.

In the end, it was Rosalind who broke the thick dark quiet, and Skye cursed the words she used to do so.

"Jeffery called for you."

"Good grief."

She didn't call him back.

...

When a small town boy came by later that day, wearing a wilted bowtie and carrying flowers, it was Skye of all people that opened the door.

 _(Small town boy, you should have known better.)_

Pearson left with bloody nose part two. When Skye didn't come back inside afterwards, Jane wandered outside looking for her and shook her head at the blood on her knuckles and the blood on her black dress. She returned with a damp rag, which she pressed gingerly to the back of Skye's hand as Skye sunk to the porch steps.

They watched as people they had never seen in their whole lives hurried in and out of the Greiger household, offering flowers and condolences. Skye felt a very particular hatred for them. These people didn't really know the Greigers. They didn't know Nick.

"We have to get out of here," Skye said. "This town is full of cops with water guns and poets who don't read. You know how I feel about phonies." The only blood on her hands now was her own.

They stood there squinting at the setting sun for a long time in silence, shoulder to shoulder.

"I read," Jane said finally.

Skye grinned and rolled her eyes. "I know that, doofus."

Jane shoved her playfully with her elbow and Skye shoved her back.

...

That night, Skye tiptoed downstairs in stocking feet to do some math problems in the kitchen. Under her arm she carried books full of differentiable equations and a green notebook. She found that routine helped. Having problems she could actually _solve_ , helped.

When she reached the bottom stairs, she froze. Quiet but strained whispers came from the kitchen, and Skye instinctually leaned closer to listen.

"My brother just _died_ Rosalind, do you expect me to sit idly by?"

"Why can't you stay for me?"

Skye leaned over the handrail so she could peek into the kitchen. Rosalind was standing there in the middle of the room with her arms crossed carefully in front of her. Tommy stood staring out the window, his back to Rosalind.

Batty might call her a snoop. Ben _definitely_ would. But despite the rush of guilt that came with overhearing the obviously private conversation, Skye was rooted to the spot by the growing feeling of dread in her stomach. Rosalind and Tommy were a constant thing in life. They never fought, never wavered...

"Just go."

"Rosalind."

"I don't care."

Later, after Tommy left with a flourish and the screen door banging behind him, Skye slipped downstairs and sat at the kitchen table next to Rosalind, who had her head buried in her hands.

"Are you going to say anything?" Rosalind finally grumbled.

Skye thought about it for a minute and then shook her head. "No."

 _I don't care._

Then, changing her mind, Skye whispered, "You lied."

It was the first time Skye had ever heard Rosalind tell a lie.

...

Tommy enlisted with the Army the following day. For weeks after, Rosalind wept at the door and wondered where god was in war.


	5. Persephone

Chapter Five

"Persephone"

(Batty-18, Jane-24, Skye-25, Rosalind-26)

Skye took a research position at MIT and moved into a dingy apartment right in thicket of the brick buildings and streetcars of Boston. Her apartment had dark wood floors and a little creaky bed that she slept in alone. On her ceiling there were glow-in-the-dark stars, no doubt remnants of renters past. Tonight, as she sat with her notes and textbooks in a semi circle around her on the floor with nothing but a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling to light the room, those little florescent stars glowed faintly. She told herself that she would take them down soon, that they were much to childish for a twenty-five year old's bedroom, but she had lived there for months and had yet to do so. The truth was, she slept better with them there.

She was scribbling something about electron orbitals in her notebook when the old cord phone rang. She wasn't sure what convinced her to answer it. Maybe she felt a little disconnected in such a big city. Maybe she was tired of making racket that nobody seemed to hear. She picked up the phone.

"Skye!" He sounded surprised, which was funny, considering he called her.

"That's my name."

"You picked up."

"Yeah." The was a long moment where the only sound was each other's breathing, somehow still so familiar, and the static on the line.

"I, uh - how are you?"

Skye was vaguely aware of the fact that she was clutching the phone tightly enough to make her hand hurt. "I'm fine." She paused, and as an afterthought asked "you?"

"I am a mess mostly," Jeffrey said and his subsequent bark of laughter was enough to diffuse the tension on the line. Skye smiled gratefully and sagged into the phone. "I have been playing clarinet like a mad man. Carnegie one day, the Boston Symphony Hall the next... It's crazy. And um, I got a girlfriend."

Skye feigned shock. "But Jeffrey! That would involve you knowing how to talk to a girl!"

Jeffrey made a noise of indignation and Skye laughed.

"What's her name?" Skye asked, suddenly serious.

"Sarah."

"Okay."

"Okay," he said. Then...

"I miss you, Skye."

She swallowed thickly. "Don't be gross."

"I mean it."

"I know."

...

When Batty got accepted to Juilliard, Charlie naturally tagged along. They moved into an apartment together in the Bronx where she practiced constantly and Charlie teased her and made sure she always remembered to eat. While she went to school on a full scholarship, Charlie worked odd jobs during the day, and played sets in little odd venues at night. He would tell her he could feel his big break coming, and Batty tried not to worry about him. On days when she was uninspired and Charlie was off delivering papers or making overpriced lattes, she would wander around the city, linger outside of concert halls and jazz clubs.

One cold fall night she was doing just that, lingering outside of a jazz club where a complete brass band was in full swing downstairs. She had begged the man at the door to let her in for the music, but he firmly refused to allow anyone under twenty-one into the club. And so she lingered, kicking at leaves that rattled like bones against the pavement and clinging to a cup of coffee for warmth. She was busy counting off the measures of the jazzy music floating up from the bar when a man with dark hair and a dark trench coat bustled out the door and fell into step in front of her on the sidewalk. He carried at his side a clarinet case.

She couldn't tell you what it was about the man that possessed her to follow him. Perhaps it was the familiarity in the stride. Perhaps it was the bit of frustration she was harboring for the scary looking bouncer at the door. Either way, she followed the man for a long while until she found herself on Seventh Avenue, Carnegie Hall looming across the street. The man with the clarinet swiftly cut across the street and ducked into the alleyway behind the music hall, and Batty followed blindly. When she reached the dark ally, she caught the briefest look of the man as he was disappearing into a side door, and could have sworn the man's eyes were the exact shade of jade as Jeffrey's.

The color was startling enough to wake her up from her trance-like state and she lurched forward after him. "Jeffrey?" she called. Running now, the frost encrusted sidewalk slick beneath her feet. "Jeffrey!" She got to the door and was surprised to find herself face to face with a heavyset guard instead of the slender clarinet man.

"Oh!" she squeaked. To her credit, the guard seemed just as surprised to see her.

"Um, you can't be here, miss." He had a thick Italian accent.

"Please, I think I know that man."

Suddenly music began to pour through the doorway, from deep inside the belly of the warmly lit building out onto the cold streets of New York. Batty sagged forward, pulled toward the music almost against her will, and caught herself against the doorjamb.

The guard was ruffled. "You, um," he cleared his throat. "Big fan of music, huh?"

Batty looked up at him. The man seemed almost scared of her, despite being easily three times her size. She realized then how positively loony she must look, chasing after a man she mostly likely doesn't know and being pulled towards the music as if she were possessed by it. A bubble of laughter tickled up her throat, and suddenly she was overcome with it. The man, looking confused but largely relieved, laughed with her.

"I must look insane," she said, dabbing at her eyes with her sleeve.

The man produced a kerchief and handed it to her. Batty thought it looked funny and delicate in his large, ruddy hands. "Thank you," she said, gratefully.

"Of course. Listen I, uh - if you wanna go in, I'll let ya. Be quiet though, you hear? The main hall is the third door on the left."

And Batty did, slipping inside the third door on her left and finding herself behind a huge stage. Backstage was dark and crowded with instrument cases, lurking like human figures in the dark corners. A grand piano caught the few shafts of light that slipped through the dark red velvet curtains and reflected it off its shiny black surface. Batty lingered in the shadows and peeked out behind the curtains onto the grand stage, where two men in dark suits stood, playing for an empty hall. The music was echoing and haunting.

One man was sitting and holding a cello. The other was playing the most beautiful clarinet piece she had ever heard. Something about the way he played was heartbreakingly familiar. She knew in an instant who those delicate fingers belonged to, and wondered just when she lost the ability to pick him out with certainty on the street. It had been so long.

She never said hello, simply left when the song ended and went home. Something about idea of talking to him felt wrong, the way one might feel addressing their shadow.

Now, on days when she felt particularly uninspired, she would pick up coffee and donuts for the guard at the door and hide herself in the curtains behind the stage, losing herself to the music. The dark velvet curtains would hang heavy around her shoulders like a cape, and the grand hall would echo and the chandelier would drip gold and light.

Jeffery never returned, but Batty felt like a kid again.

...

Three days into October, Skye followed the address he left on her voicemail to a little apartment on the edge of the city. She brought six oranges as a peace offering, because that seemed hospitable and adult-ish. As she ascended five flights of dingy concrete stairs to his apartment door, Skye began to resent the stupid, fragrant fruits.

"Skye! I'm glad you came."

A beat passed.

"And you brought oranges?" Jeffrey grinned kindly.

Skye huffed and pushed her way past him and into his apartment.

"Dumb, right? I brought oranges! Like _that's_ going to help..." she gestured wildly at the space between them. "I don't know!" Skye kicked at the air."Stupid," she muttered. "Stupid, stupid, stupid."

Jeffrey reached out and put his hands on her shoulders, successfully stopping her flow of words.

"Skye. It's okay. I _like_ oranges."

Skye blinked, then laughed despite herself.

"Well. Thank god."

The room felt too small for the two of them, and so they sat out on the fire escape.

The day was cold and bright, like each new orange they peeled. They watched as people below them tucked scarves under their chins and bustled around, and watched as leaves, crunchy and brown, rattled down the sidewalks. Jeffrey pointed out a young woman, dressed in a green skirt and carrying a violin case. "She probably plays wonderful waltzes," he said. Skye rolled her eyes and pointed out an old man with wild, white hair. She said he looked like Einstein, and probably thought beautifully complex thoughts. Jeffrey liked that. Skye watched as Jeffrey worked his fingers, delicate as always, under the orange skins, tearing away the rough outside to get to the fleshy fruit. When Skye did the same, she flicked the little peices of skin at Jeffrey, and they both laughed like they'd never been lonely.

So they sat on the fire escape, and the irony was not lost on Skye. She was sitting there with him like she had run naked from the fire inside, only to find she had taken the burning thing out with her. Jeffrey turned his head towards the horizon and tipped his chin toward the dying sun, lighting his face in fleeting gold and red. She had gotten good at ignoring the low heat of the thing. The gnawing desperation, something like fear, or desire maybe. But the canary was lying dead in the pit of her stomach. They say that more often than not, it's the smoke that gets you first.

So maybe this is hell, dark, and firey, and beautiful. So maybe this is hell and Hades is covered in orange peels and Persephone is laughing in the corner, the sweet flesh of the fruit in her left side cheek.

There are two sides to this story. Persephone eats her fill and licks the orange juice languidly off her fingers but she keeps a dagger under her dress and against her thigh ( _just in case_ she says, _these corners get so dark_ ). Persephone waits for spring and wraps her arms around herself when the nights get cold. Hades watches her toss orange peels at him with barely concealed amusement. This is what it's like to love a girl that doesn't want to stay and sleeps firmly on her side of the bed. He has seen the dagger, he's no fool. The thing is, he would let her kill him, time and time again, if thats what it took for her to really see him.

"I missed this," Skye said, once the oranges were gone. She licked a spot of sticky ornage juice from her thumb. Jeffrey thought she looked eleven years old again.

"Have I regained my best friend status?" he asked. Skye spit an orange seed into her palm, looking contemplative and pretending to really mull it over. "Oh c'mon!" he said finally, and she laughed. "As if you ever lost it."

"I'm going to marry her," he said suddenly, but slowly. Jeffrey watched as Skye grew very still. He would never know what possessed him to say this to her in that moment.

"Who?"

"Sarah."

"Oh. Okay."

"Okay?"

"Yeah."

...

 _And so Persephone never learns how to trust, and Hades never learns the art of unloving. Dear reader, isn't this how all the great mythologies go?_

...

Skye threw herself into her studies, because that was all she ever knew how to do. She wrote a thesis in physics, specifically on the concept of entropy. She spent countless hours at the campus planetarium, replaying old tapes of universe expansion and star explosions.

One Friday night, when all of the other twenty-somethings were off getting drunk in bars and kissing the mouths of strangers, Skye waited in the lobby of the planetarium. Families shuffled in and out of the weekly planetarium shows talking animatedly about the constellations, and Skye couldn't help but feel a little nostalgic. There was a day when her father took her to the very same shows, and they would sit in the dark together, watching the dome and counting stars before the show started. Skye didn't let herself dwell on much, but she let herself linger on this, turning over the bittersweet memory in her mouth.

Once the planetarium was vacated, Skye slipped into the equipment booth and put in the tape with her favorite show (one on dark matter, narrated by Neil deGrasse Tyson). She wandered to the middle of the dome, which she now had all to herself, and laid down on the carpeted floor, looking up at the starry ceiling.

"Excuse me, ma'am." One of the researchers that helped with the shows was standing in the doorway, a silhouette backlit with yellow light. Skye recognized him as they guy that did the more complex show on astronomical physics. "Do you have clearance to be in here?"

"Yeah," she said. "I got it." She waved around a little plastic card that said "Researcher" at the top with her name and a god-awful picture of her on it.

"Okay." He hesitated for a moment at the door. "What are you doing?"

Skye rolled her eyes. "Dissolving." She had meant to sound more sarcastic than she did.

"Oh."

The light from the door disappeared, and assuming he was gone, Skye retrained her eyes on the stars above her. A long, quiet moment passed. Then suddenly, Skye felt a body slide down to the floor next to hers. "Mind if I dissolve with you?"

And that's how Skye met a boy named August in the middle of December - begrudgingly, but with a hit of relief to no longer be alone. She knew that laying in the dark there with him wouldn't fix a thing, but it felt like maybe it could. That night she dug out her science journal for the first time in months and wrote:

Entropy: a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system's thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system.

She underlined in blue ink for emphasis. Even the messiest of things are quantifiable.

...

Jane moved to France because _"I'm twenty-four for god's sake!"_ and read big books written by pre-twentieth century writers who all confused love with lust. Called Skye in panic about the life line on her palm that appeared to be cut short and hung up when Skye tried to calm her down with an explanation of entropy (with the expanding randomness in the universe the probability of a correlation between palm lines and longevity of life is improbable, you see). She kissed a man on the street and when he asked for her number, she wrote the number of her high school soccer jersey (lucky number seven) on the back of his hand and left him there, standing on the sidewalk. When she called Skye on the phone later that night to tell her about the man on the sidewalk, Skye found this hilarious and complimented her profusely.

...

Skye wouldn't call it a "date" _per say_. Rosalind did. And Jane. Even little Batty betrayed her and called it - that. It wasn't a date.

It was a movie. And dinner. And a broken down car halfway home.

August apologised profusely for the malfunction of his old Buick and Skye just laughed. The stars were out. She liked walking better anyway.

"I had a really nice time," August said.

"Me too."

"But..." He drew out the word like it was elastic and might come snapping back at him. "You aren't interested in more." It's not a question, simply an observation.

"I'm no good at this."

"No shit," he said. Skye whipped her head around to look at him accusingly, but his laughing eyes told her that it was merely a joke. She felt her shoulders relax and Skye Penderwick laughed despite herself, the feeling odd and bubbling. He shoved his hands in his pockets and they walked a little further.

"Someday," he said, "somebody is going to come around with the audacity to love you unapologetically. What then?"

"I should hope for his sake he learns better very quickly." (She didn't think his name. She _didn't_.)

"I hope for your sake he never learns." Skye punched his shoulder and he laughed, deep and grumbling.

"I wonder what it would feel like to be loved by someone like you."

"Terrible, probably."

August grinned and turned around to face her, walking backward with ease."Devastating, most likely," he countered.

"Gut wrenching!" Skye said.

"Life wrecking!"

Skye laughed. "Now that's just harsh."


End file.
